In the Press Column

Research on how the bond between mother and child defines infants'
sense of security has revolutionized psychology and altered "basic
attitudes toward early childhood care," writes Robert Karen in the
February issue of The Atlantic.

But while the research on "attachment theory" has transformed
perceptions of the importance of physical contact and responsiveness in
the primary caregiver, the writer observes, it yields no conclusive
answers on whether children are harmed by substitute care.

Mr. Karen examines research of the last two decades challenging the
view of behaviorists that mother-child attachment was merely a function
of feeding.

Profiling several theorists, he focuses on the psychologist Mary
Ainsworth, who developed what he calls the first method "to assess how
styles of parenting contributed to individual differences."

Using the "strange situation" technique, researchers first observed
mothers responding to infants in various situations in their homes;
when the children reached the age of 12 months, the researchers
observed them in a lab separated from their mothers, both with a
stranger present and on their own.

Ms. Ainsworth found that those she labeled "securely
attached"--generally associated with mothers more responsive to feeding
signals and crying--protested upon separation from the mother but were
easy to console on her return. Those "insecurely" or "anxiously"
attached--linked with inconsistent, interfering, or unresponsive
mothers--refused to be soothed or snubbed and avoided the mother upon
her return.

In succeeding studies, Mr. Karen writes, researchers found that
without intervention, such patterns persist as the child grows older,
with the insecurely attached lacking self-reliance, having poor peer
relations, and becoming hopeless when fearful of separation.

While some psychologists maintain that such effects are more a
function of genetic or temperamental differences than parental styles,
Mr. Karen notes, others have used the data to argue against placing
infants in substitute care for long intervals.

He suggests that the day-care debate be viewed in the context of
economic and societal trends driving both parents to work, and that
"compensations" be provided to better support families, make it easier
for parents to take time off to care for infants, and help schools work
with children with "anxious attachment styles."

"Needless to say, we are ages away from making such commitments," he
says.

Widespread reforms of public education in the United States have
historically succeeded only when "political and social anxieties
coincided with a public perception that the schools were not in tune
with the needs of society," writes Carl F. Kaestle in the February
issue of American Heritage.

Tracing reform efforts from the late 18th century to the present,
Mr. Kaestle, professor of educational policy studies and history at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, suggests that the current "back to
basics" movement is the latest in a series of reform cycles that have
fluctuated from conservative to liberal, depending on the public
mood.

In the first successful campaign--led by Horace Mann in the 19th
century--efforts to raise enrollment and attendance rates met with
resistance, Mr. Kaestle points out, until public sentiment shifted and
"people realized that a high level of education was needed for the
market-oriented economy that industrialization brought with it."

Similarly, it was not until 1890, after 20 years of criticism over a
perceived lack of moral education in the schools, that problems of
labor strife, immigration, and economic depression intensified concerns
''about whether the public schools were doing an adequate job of moral
education and cultural assimilation."

In this century, Mr. Kaestle writes, the pendulum of school reform
has swung from conservative calls for bolstering mathematics, science,
and foreign-language training after the launching of Sputnik in 1957,
to liberal reforms, spurred by the political and social upheaval of the
1960's, emphasizing equal access to education and recognition of
student diversity.

"The cycles of public-school reform in our history have had limited
effects compared with their goals," he notes.

But even so, Mr. Kaestle concludes, the reforms have served a useful
purpose in forcing educators "to think about what they are doing to
defend it, to fine-tune it, and to think about the whole enterprise
they are engaged in."

And with the difficulties facing schools in the 1990's, he writes,
reformers will have their work cut out for them.

The National Research Council's recent landmark report on the status of
black Americans was crucially flawed in that it blamed the lower
standing of blacks solely on discrimination and refused to take into
account evidence of race-based differences in ability, argues R.J.
Herrnstein in the winter issue of The Public Interest.

The Harvard University psychology professor contends that A Common
Destiny: Blacks and American Society, the 600-page document issued last
summer, ignores hundreds of studies since the beginning of the century
that have found lower average black achievement on standardized tests
of intelligence or cognitive aptitude.

According to Mr. Herrnstein, the report is rooted in the
"discrimination model," a view attributing racial differences to
unequal opportunities and unequal treatment by institutions. It fails
to consider the alternative "distributional model," which explains
differing averages by referring to the characteristics of the
populations themselves, he maintains.

By shunning the taboo subject of race-based differences in average
intellectual endowments, Mr. Herrnstein continues, the report's authors
fall into the error of logic of saying that economic status determines
intelligence, even though it is just as plausible to argue that
intelligence determines economic status--and most plausible to suggest
that the lines of causality run in both directions.

There is "no clear evidence," he observes, that the gap in test
scores "shrank when the economic gap between the races was
shrinking."

Arguing that "we can hardly hope to discover constructive public
policies" while ignoring the effects of distributional factors, Mr.
Herrnstein asks: "How much are we as a society willing to pay to try to
equalize the races by benefiting the children of one race and not the
other, even if the distributional model partially explains the observed
differences between them?"

Faulting the public schools for their reluctance to "take
responsibility for the character of their students," Kathleen Kennedy
Townsend writes in the January issue of The Washington Monthly that
there are ''some values that teachers should affirm."

In a survey cited by Ms. Townsend, who runs a Maryland program
designed to involve students in community service, three times as many
young people between the ages of 15 and 24 selected "career success" as
chose "community service," when they were asked what goals they
considered important.

Such attitudes are the result, she suggests, of "deliberate
educational policy." The schools "wash their hands of the teaching of
virtue, doing little to create an environment that teaches children the
importance of self-discipline, obligation, and civic
participation."

She traces the breakdown of what she calls the "inculcation
consensus" to two developments beginning in the early 20th century: a
growing respect for science and the denial of religious groups that
"moral instruction could be carried on apart from religion."

Education was also influenced, she writes, by the pragmatism of John
Dewey and others, which "rejected metaphysical notions of human
conduct."

And the civil-rights and antiwar movements of the 1960's challenged
the old values as immoral, Ms. Townsend notes. One result was the rise
of the moral-development theory called "values clarification,"
according to which it is "wrong for teachers to endorse any values; all
they can do is help students discover their own."

She observes that Americans are "justly worried about party lines of
any kind" and cautions that teaching values requires "special skills
and real sensitivity to student and community needs."

But because both families and churches have lost strength in recent
decades, she argues, only the schools "are guaranteed to get a shot at
kids."

"That's why their current fumbling of anything smacking of right and
wrong is so disastrous," she writes.

Vol. 09, Issue 22

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